STUDY GUIDES/QUIZES
Guide to Map Quiz
Prepare well for the map quiz and you will establish a foundation
for following the lectures and beginning to make sense of key developments
and regional diversity in Latin America during the colonial period.
The quiz will be given in section meetings during the second week of
the semester. 80% correct is a passing mark. You will not receive a
letter grade on the quiz, but you must pass it in order to earn a passing
grade in the course. If you fail the quiz twice in the second week, you may take it again
in Professor Taylor's office until you pass, but with the following
penalty: loss of one letter grade on the first written assignment (the
essay on "The Conquest of Mexico") if you pass the make-up
quiz during week 3; loss of two letter grades on the first written assignment
if you pass the quiz later in the semester.
To prepare for the quiz, consult the maps in Bakewell, History,
pp. xviii-xxiii, Colonial Latin America: A Documentary History,
and the handouts.
For the quiz you should be prepared to locate:
the modern mainland nations of Latin America
the islands of Cuba, Hispaniola (Haiti and Dominican Republic), Puerto
Rico and Jamaica
The following cities and towns:
Mexico City, Veracruz, Guadalajara (Mexico)
Porto Belo, Panama City (Panama)
Bogotá, Cartagena, Popayán (Colombia)
Caracas (Venezuela)
Quito, Guayaquil (Ecuador)
Lima, Cuzco, Arequipa (Peru)
Potosí, La Paz, Sucre [known as Chuquisaca and La Plata] (Bolivia)
Buenos Aires, Tucumán (Argentina)
Montevideo (Uruguay)
Asunción (Paraguay)
Santiago (Chile)
Havana (Cuba)
Santo Domingo (Dominican Republic, on Hispaniola)
Salvador [Bahia], Olinda, Recife, Ouro Preto, Rio de Janeiro (Brazil)
The following bodies of water: Lake Titicaca; Amazon
River; Orinoco River: Río de la Plata; Magdalena River; São
Francisco River; Paraguay River; Paraná River
The twelve audiencia districts and capitals of Spanish
America (ten as of 1650. See the handout map)
Ten key captaincies of Brazil in the 18th century:
Grão Pará, Maranhão, Ceará, Paraíba,
Pernambuco, Bahia, Minas Gerais, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and
Rio Grande do Sul (see map in Bakewell, History, p. xxiii and
the clearer, more detailed version in the Colonial Latin America)
The “core” areas of colonial Latin America
in 1550, 1650, and the late colonial period. (See the three maps in
the handout.)
SAMPLE MAP QUIZ
1. Locate the “core” or “central” areas of
Latin America in 1550 and the late colonial period.
2. Locate and name five of the audiencia capitals of Spanish America.
3. Locate the Brazilian captaincies of Pernambuco and Bahia.
4. Locate the Magdalena and São Francisco Rivers.
5. Locate the following countries and towns/cities:
Venezuela
Santiago (Chile)
Veracruz
Argentina
Costa Rica
Guatemala
Havana
Porto Belo
Study guide for
discussion and the essay on Victors and Vanquished: Spanish and Nahua
Views of the Conquest of Mexico.
1.
Inventory and characterize the various sources presented to you
in this book of readings on Spanish and “Indian” views of the Conquest
of Mexico.
2. Editor Schwartz writes that there was not simply “a Spanish” or “an Indian” view of the Conquest. From reading this book, what would you say are the differences between Spanish and Indian accounts of the Conquest? And the differences within each of these two groups of accounts?
3.
What would you say you have learned (and not learned) about the Conquest of Mexico from reading this book? Were native Americans “the vanquished” in the events recounted in Victors and Vanquished between 1519 and the 1530s?
4.
Consider the questions prepared by editor Stuart Schwartz on pp. 247 and 248.
5. Passages from Bernal Díaz del Castillo’s True History take up about half of documents section. Editor Schwartz identifies four themes in Bernal Díaz’s account (pp. 40-42). Consider them. What other themes and viewpoints do you find in Bernal Díaz’s account?
6. Look closely at the images included in this book. Do you find anything in them that the editor misses?
7.
Select two or three quotes for discussion.
Study/Discussion Guide for Inga Clendinnen’s
Ambivalent Conquests
How would you describe this book?
What is its subject? What is the author’s approach? Why is the title “ambivalent conquests”? She speaks of most of her primary sources as “deeply partisan Spanish accounts.” What can we hope to learn from them? What other sources does she draw from? Does it make sense to divide the book into two parts?
How was Yucatán changed at different stages by Spanish colonization in the sixteenth century (for example, after 1562)?
In what sense was there a conquest of Yucatán? How were the Mayas changed and not changed by Spanish colonization during the sixteenth century?
What did Yucatec Mayas think of the early Spaniards and how did Mayas receive them (at different times)?
How did the Mayas receive Christianity (again, at different times)? What is meant by Clendinnen’s statement that “Mayas experienced subjugation without relinquishing their sense of autonomy”?
What was the place of Franciscan missionaries, encomenderos, and royal governors in the early colonial history of Yucatán? How does it compare to other parts of Spanish America?
How do you explain Diego de Landa’s fury in 1562?
Be alert to the following individuals: Francisco de Montejo; Diego
de Landa; Francisco de Toral; Diego Quijada; Juan Nachi Cocom; Francisco
Hernández; Tomás López Medel.
Essay assignment on Ambivalent Conquests, due October 2. Write on one of the following questions:
1. 1. What seem to be the differences between the Conquest story in central Mexico (as you know it from Victors and Vanquished) and Yucatán (as know it from Clendinnen)? What might explain them?
2. 2. What were the fundamental misunderstandings between Spaniards and Mayas in sixteenth-century Yucatán? What bearing did they have on the course of Spanish colonization there?
Study/Discussion Guide for Bakewell’s
Silver and Entrepreneurship in 17th-c Potosí
Bakewell writes of Antonio López de Quiroga as “a man
who faced both ways in time.” In light of your reading of this
book (the whole book!) and your study of Spanish America in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, what might this statement mean?
Why was López de Quiroga a successful miner and businessman
during a time of general decline in Potosí?
Was it largely a matter of personal genius?
How did he establish himself in America, and why didn’t he return
to Spain?
What kind of person does he seem to have been?
What were the qualities that won him trust and made him enemies?
Why did he hold no important political offices?
Why was he unable to gain a title of nobility?
Was he a scrupulous man? A “robber baron”? A Spanish American
Scrooge?
Bakewell speaks of a “Catholic capitalist ethic.”
What does he mean? Did López de Quiroga practice such an ethic?
If so, how?
How did Potosí differ from other large Spanish American
cities during the colonial period?
How did the mines of Potosí shape southern Andean colonial
history? Were they more important to that region’s history than
the mines of Guanajuato and Zacatecas were to colonial Mexico?
What are Bakewell’s sources of information, and how does
he use them?